5. Who was your first character to design, and what has changed in your design process since then? (how you design characters now)

The first characters I designed was Myron for Fallout 2. I was given the "child genius," but I did what I could to make sure he wasn't the Wesley Crusher archetype, which I thought was pretty played out in most media forms. In the end, however, Myron had his problems - he talked too much, could get really annoying in parts (especially if you were female) and was useless in combat. I do think he succeeded in being a highly-reactive character to events in the game and things your player did, and it was pretty awesome for high Intelligence and high Science guys to argue with him about his own creations. I really like it when he gets frustrated when you keep asking him insightful chemistry and pharmaceutical questions about Jet.

Meanwhile, original Fallout creator Tim Cain (currently of Carbine Studios) talks about his unannounced MMORPG, as well as answers some general, mostly MMO-related questions at MMOGamer. An excerpt:

Tim Cain

The MMO Gamer: So then what is fun to you? Define “fun” in an MMO.

Tim Cain: Well, the reason I like playing MMOs, is for all my life I’ve played RPGs. I gravitate towards them, I’ve made a number of them in the past.

But, MMOs have that added dimension of you’re there with thousands of other people, they’re trying to do the same things you’re trying to do, and your friends are there too, witnessing you do this.

I think part of the fun that comes out of that is just, the fun of it being social, the fun of it being a communal effort.

Going back to single-player RPGs, you feel lonely. It’s like, “Did you see that cool thing I just did?” It’s much more fun playing these games in a group. I always have one character, I was saying earlier, that I make that I don’t tell anybody about.